Though you would think I would have noticed that it had been almost five years, this stark fact was actually surprising to me. I don’t consider myself a workaholic, at least not the kind who would openly defend things like not taking vacations. I’m the sort who tries to keep my occasional late nights and occasional late mornings in a rough balance, and I tend to believe pretty strongly that the Europeans have got the right idea over us insane Americans; here two weeks’ paid vacation per year is considered acceptable, nay even luxurious.

I find it strange to admit that it seems, somewhere along the line, albeit unconsciously, I must have been infected with the American insanity about work (“I’d rather have the extra paycheck and no time to spend it”).

Suddenly discovering my collusion in this insane system has added a little punch to the recommendations of people like former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who has been saying for a few years now that we should mandate four weeks of paid vacation a year (current average: two. Current mandatory minimum: Ha, ha, trick question), and the authors of books like The Importance of Being Lazy and In Praise of Slowness. I haven’t read these books, though I expect I would agree with much of what they say. I’m not sure I will read them. It kind of feels like reading books about exercise. I imagine they have a use for people who still believe that 12-hour work days are a reasonable thing and that it’s no problem to have kids who don’t quite recognize their faces.

For the rest of us, I don’t think we need convincing so much as a good shake and a recommendation of a cheap bed and breakfast. Much as I think it’s mean not to pay people for their unused vacation time when they leave jobs, I almost think it would be a good idea if we didn’t, to remove that monetary incentive to work ourselves into the ground.

In order to gird myself to recognize future vacation slippage, I’ve attempted to figure out where all my nonvacation time went. After all, I can’t argue for four weeks if I don’t know what I did with two or three. Here’s some of where I frittered it away: I used it to move from New Jersey to Brooklyn, and a year later from Brooklyn to upper Manhattan. I used it to keep the paychecks coming for a little while between jobs. I used it to travel to protests at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, and to stay in D.C. for a week after the IMF/World Bank protests in 2000 to wait for my friends to get out of jail. I used it on holiday trips to see family, a conference in a field I briefly thought I wanted to get a master’s degree in, and long weekends visiting friends, attending folk festivals, or checking out places in the Northeast where I might want to settle down when I fled the Big Apple. A lot of stuff, some of which I enjoyed, some of which was valuable to my sanity, and some of which I even may have called vacation at the time.

However, no offense to my friends and family whom I dearly love to visit, but having just had one, I can conclusively state that none of the above, including visiting with people, counts as a real vacation. Anytime where I have to spend a lot of time “catching up” (i.e., talking about the very things I’m trying to take a break from) doesn’t achieve full breakdom, as precious as that time is. Any time with volunteer work, complex social-circle interactions, or the risk of arrest doesn’t count either. To achieve the melting of the rocks in my shoulders and quieting of the tics in my brain it appears that I need a full-out departure from life as I know it.

My recent week’s vacation involved a lot of not knowing what time it was, going to bed when tired, rising when awake, eating when hungry, being quiet, breathing fresh air, watching birds, staring at streams, and having goofy, spur-of-the-moment adventures (and being rushed on the trail by an angry mother ruffed grouse, which doesn’t count as relaxing, but was fun). We learned how far 13 miles is in the woods (too far to start in the afternoon), how big beavers are (a lot bigger than you think), and how quickly you can burn through a stump that didn’t actually fit in the fireplace when you dragged it from another campsite (just a couple days), but other than that there’s really not a whole lot to tell. That’s part of the glory of it. With the help of arriving home a full day before I had to go back to work, I didn’t even feel like I needed a vacation from my vacation. Perhaps that, in the end, should be the real test of a real vacation.